Discussion (19) ¬

Personally I like the “queer” label best; it’s enough to signify “I don’t fall within the ‘conventional’ cis-gendered heterosexual label”, while being vague enough to get you trapped into a tight box that you can’t get out of.

I used to identify as bisexual but that never really felt right because the bi implies 2 and for me it was too binary. Then I heard the term pansexual and it fit me perfectly. I’ve recently found out that many people who identify as bisexual don’t see it as a binary identity and don’t only like cis people. But I still prefer the label pansexual because the label itself makes people think and realize that there are more than just two genders. 🙂

Yeah, me too. It appears that it might have meant more all along, but most people aren’t aware of it. I went to a Bi/Pan/Fluid institute at Creating Change this year and we had a long discussion about labels and identities and meanings. A lot of people under 25 or so identify as pansexual for the same reasons I do. But many people older than that identify as bisexual but their definition of the identity is the same as the one I use for pansexual. It really made me happy that so many bi-activism leaders aren’t as binary as I once thought, and that they’re very trans-friendly. The whole institute helped me realize that I can see my identity as falling under the “B” in LGBT, even if I don’t strictly identify as bisexual. The “B” can be more of an umbrella term. We started using the term Bi* to mean about the same thing that trans* means (that there are multiple identities under that one umbrella). It was really pretty cool.